There is a particular pleasure in standing before a painting on the Croisette and finding, instead of the expected serenity of blue and pale gold, something feverish and cartoonish and alive. La Malmaison — the slim Belle Époque pavilion wedged between the grand hotels at 47 boulevard de la Croisette — has always had a talent for this kind of surprise. Its white rooms and tall windows give onto the sea, yet the art inside has never been content to simply reflect the view.
This autumn, those rooms belong to Hervé Di Rosa.
A Painter Who Travels to Paint
The exhibition Mirages du monde, les peintures d'Hervé Di Rosa runs from 17 July to 8 November 2026, and on Thursday 24 September at 16h30, La Malmaison offers a one-hour guided visit through the artist's work. Di Rosa is one of the founders of figuration libre — the French movement that erupted in the early 1980s as a deliberate, even gleeful, rejection of conceptual austerity. Where minimalism had drained the image, figuration libre flooded it back: bright colour, borrowed iconography, the visual grammar of comics, advertising, and street culture. Di Rosa, born in Montpellier in 1959, became one of its most travelled practitioners.
The word 'travelled' is not incidental. His practice is inseparable from movement — across continents, across traditions, across techniques. He has worked with craftsmen and artisans in West Africa, Mexico, India, and beyond, absorbing local pictorial languages and weaving them into a body of work that is at once deeply personal and promiscuously cosmopolitan. The comics-inflected figures, the flat planes of saturated colour, the recurring cast of invented characters — all of it accumulates into something that reads less like a retrospective than like a diary written in paint.
'L'artiste explore toutes les techniques picturales au fil de ses aventures à travers le monde.' — La Malmaison programme note
What the Guided Hour Offers
The visit is structured as a single guided hour — long enough to read the work carefully, short enough to leave you wanting more. A guide leads visitors through the exhibition, providing the kind of contextual thread that transforms looking into understanding: the roots of figuration libre, Di Rosa's particular place within it, the techniques and geographies that have shaped each canvas.
For those unfamiliar with the movement, the framing is genuinely useful. Figuration libre did not emerge in a vacuum; it arrived alongside the New York neo-expressionists — Basquiat, Haring — and the German Neue Wilde, and understanding those currents helps locate Di Rosa's work on a broader map. For those who already know the territory, the guided format still rewards: La Malmaison's curators tend to find angles that the works themselves do not immediately announce.
Practical details are straightforward. The full-price ticket is €8.50; reduced admission of €5.50 applies to visitors aged 18–25, Cannes Pass Culture holders, and Cannes Seniors Le Club members. Those under 18, students, job-seekers, and holders of a disability card (plus one companion) pay €2. The venue is at 47 boulevard de la Croisette — on foot from the Palais des Festivals, a matter of minutes along the seafront.
September on the Côte d'Azur has its own particular quality. The summer crowds have thinned, the light has softened from white to amber, and the Croisette recovers something of its unhurried self. An afternoon that ends with Di Rosa's vivid, restless canvases — and then spills back out onto the boulevard as the sun drops toward the Esterel — is not a bad way to spend a Thursday in the south of France.